“I think,” she said slowly, “that I need to fix this. Not because of the house, Kate. I need you to believe that. Because of Emma.”
I wanted to believe her. Some part of me, the part of me that was still her daughter underneath everything else, genuinely wanted to believe her. But I also remembered the flat, dismissive tone in her voice at the door the night before, the way she’d glanced past Emma like she was simply an inconvenience standing between her and closing the door. I wasn’t ready to hand her easy forgiveness just because a piece of paper had suddenly made the stakes real to her.
“I think,” I said carefully, “that you need to figure out what fixing it actually looks like. Not to me. To Emma.”
We talked for a while longer, the conversation moving through some of the same ground more than once, my mother circling back repeatedly to apologies I wasn’t yet ready to fully accept. Eventually we hung up, both of us emotionally exhausted, and I sat at my kitchen table for a long time afterward, staring at the faint scorch mark Emma’s pan had left on the stovetop.
Ruth called me again that evening, wanting to know how the conversation with my mother had gone. I told her honestly — that it felt like a start, but not yet like enough.
“It won’t be enough with words alone,” Ruth said. “Diane needs to actually show your daughter, not just tell her.”
Two days later, Ruth invited our whole family — Robert, my mother, Daniel, Emma, and me — back out to the house on Birchwood Lane, framing it carefully as a chance to properly celebrate Christmas the way it should have happened in the first place. I was hesitant, and Emma, when I told her about it, went very quiet in a way that worried me.
“Do I have to go?” she asked.
“No,” I told her honestly. “Not if you don’t want to. This is entirely up to you.”
She thought about it for a long moment, sitting on the edge of her bed with her knees pulled up to her chest. “Will the mean part happen again?”
“I don’t think it will,” I said, and I meant it, though I understood completely why she needed to ask. “But if it does, even a little bit, we will leave immediately, and I will not ask you to stay for one more second than you want to. That’s a promise.”
